We're on a map!

azurelunatic made an icon of the Dreamwidth island, for your viewing pleasure: .

Thank you to everyone who sent us links. I grinned like a goof with every comment / entry I saw mentioning us on the map.

Code push update

Code push last weekend went off smoothly, with only a few hiccups. We fixed those as quickly as possible -- thanks to everyone who left us feedback on what things went wrong / what things went right.

We're slowly rolling out keyword renames. To clarify, because there was some confusion about this: you can still add and remove keywords on an icon as usual. What we temporarily disabled (and are now bringing back) is the ability to rename the keyword, so that the keyword in the dropdown changes but old entries and comments do not lose your icon. We're doing it slowly because it involved a major change to our backend, and we're trying to make absolutely sure that nothing goes wrong. Thanks, everyone, for your patience.

Also, if you've been waiting for the ability to rename your journal or a community you own, I'd like to remind you that you can purchase a rename token at the shop. Our FAQ How do I change my username? tells you everything you need to know about renames. (If it doesn't, let us know, and we'll add it to the FAQ ;-)). Shout out to cesy for digging through the comments in our bug tracker and coming out with the initial draft of this FAQ -- thank you!

denise preemptively highlighted the best of the new things that came out with this code push in her last news update, so let me just direct you back to that entry. I've already found two new features that I can't imagine going without anymore: collapse icon at the end of cut tags, and poll submission on the same page.

Go browse through the rest of the list if you're so inclined!

New styles and themes

This week's code push gave us a total of 47 new themes, including two new styles: Compartmentalize, which reminds me a lot of the basic Generator but with a sidebar (Generator was the very first layout I ever tried to customize so I remember it vividly *g*), and Practicality, which feels very clean.

All themes that are new with this code push is in the Featured category for journal themes.

Links and polls around the site

Someone suggested in the comments last news post that we add a tag for NaNoWriMo, and that sounded like a great idea, so have a NaNoWriMo tag on the latest page.

Entries tagged "nanowrimo", "writing: nanowrimo", "nanowrimo2010", "nanowrimo10", "nano10", or "nnwm10" will show up on that page, so you can commiserate with everyone who is suffering through the agony of novel-planning in October and novel-writing in November. Best wishes, all. (And don't worry, other people on Dreamwidth are suffering too.)

Styles Poll

We've had Skittlish Dreams: Blue as our default layout for a really long time, and while it is awesome, we have also come out with a lot of new styles and themes since then, so we'd like to ask you to look through all our layouts again, and help us decide what the default should be.

This week, we're polling for the base layout that you all like best. Next week, we'll take the themes from the winning layout and make another poll. From there, we will select a new style which will be the default for new users after they create their account.

(And did I tell you already that when you submit a poll now, you'll stay on the same page? :-D)

That's it for this week! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

denise will have you again for the next couple of weeks. I'll talk to you all again in November :-)

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I think the best choice would be to give a new user a choice of three or so layouts during journal creation (I would vote for Fluid Measure, Funky Circles and Transmogrified, to show a good diversity) and add a note that they can change these and more layouts at any point later on, but I'm not sure how do-able that is in practice.

If it's not do-able, I vote for transmogrified, because that layout is very easy to customize with a lot of options.

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It's a temporary thing -- we're still trying to figure out the best way to handle it. Basically, we don't want members of a community to wake up one morning and discover that they are suddenly a member of ex_knitting159 or something like that. So, the easiest way to handle it for the first release was to get the renames system pushed and live, and get people using it so we could discover any problems with workflow or whatever, while we figure out what the most logical minimal-restrictions we can place on personal->community renames are to prevent sudden and unexpected Weird for community members.

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Someone finally asked me for an invite, and she created her journal this morning– hooray: I grew our little island by a whole One More! (And she's a lovely One More to have on board... or is that ashore?)

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Hm. What browser are you using? (It should work -- in fact, that's how I submitted my vote for this poll.) If it isn't working -- do you have any kind of Javascript blocking set up in your browser? (The inline poll votes require JS to work.)

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Okay, so don't shoot me, but I didn't see this question in the FAQ for renames and I am looking for an answer. Is it possible to undo a rename if you had everything from oldusername redirected to the newusername? If you know, you woke up the next morning and realized that your rename was like a bad one night stand, and you just really, really wanted to pretend that it didn't happen and go back to oldusername (and you'd be willing to pay to make this happen?) Or do you accept the consequences of your actions and move forward knowing that your life has been changed by that dirty, dirty one night stand, or be forced to forge a new identity to put the ugly past behind you?

Because simply trying to rename to oldusername results in a redirection to newusername, which spawns an ugly, endless karmic cycle of bad one night stands. I had the brief idea of renaming to a third, untainted username (something like "identitycrisis"), and then attempting to rename the third, untainted username to oldusername to break the ugly karmic cycle and redirect the coveted oldusername to third, untainted username, but I don't think that the code works like that (and I was left slightly confused.)

So, erm, is there a way to reverse the past? And if not, could we add that to the FAQ so that others could learn from this mistake? :P

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Open a support request in the Account Payments category with what you want the settings to be, and we can (probably -- there are some limitations) change them for you. (We didn't want to put it in the FAQ because it's all manual.)

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My boyfriend just finished watching a series I write fic about last night. He's been wanting to read it, but neither of us wanted him to get spoiled for the finale episode.

I could just link him the tag page for my fic in that fandom and tell him to just expand and collapse his way from the bottom to read it all instead of feeling bad for making him do the multi-tab thing in his browser.